HashiCorp has largely been known among programmers as the tiny startup behind popular open-source tools like Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. But now chief executive Mitchell Hashimoto and his team are setting out to turn the company into a major dealer of software for developing, deploying, and monitoring software.

The startup today is touting a $10 million funding round. It’s not the first venture capital HashiCorp has taken on, but it does easily eclipse the $700,000 the startup brought in earlier, and it will turbocharge the startup’s activity.

Also today, the startup is unveiling a piece of closed-source software called Atlas that aggregates the Consul, Packer, Serf, Terraform, and Vagrant tools, which Hashimoto first began working on in 2009. Terraform is the newest project, having come out this past July.

“We raised this money in order to bolster our hiring in order to sell Atlas,” Hashimoto told VentureBeat in an interview.

HashiCorp has assembled the five components in such a way that they fall under three general categories: development, operations, and a runtime. Altogether, it’s possible to create development environments, build and store machine images that can be deployed on servers, and then deploy, monitor, and automatically scale applications.

Above: A diagram of the elements comprising Atlas.

Image Credit: HashiCorp

Hashicorp will sell a cloud-based version of Atlas, with a version of the software for companies’ data centers coming early next year.

Initially, business should flow from the companies that depend on HashiCorp’s open-source tools. Competition could come from companies like VMware, Hashimoto said.

San Francisco-based HashiCorp had a previous commercial product — a commercially available add-on for Vagrant that plugs in with VMware Fusion and Workstation software — but Atlas represents a much more reasonable reflection of the capabilities and focus areas of the startup.

Above: A screen shot of HashiCorp’s Atlas software.

Image Credit: HashiCorp

Hashimoto and Armon Dagar started HashiCorp in 2012.

Mayfield Fund led the new round. GGV Capital and True Ventures also participated.

]]>0HashiCorp picks up $10M, launches its first commercial DevOps productMeet Terraform, a simple command-line tool to manage all your cloud infrastructurehttp://venturebeat.com/2014/07/28/terraform-hashicorp/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/28/terraform-hashicorp/#commentsTue, 29 Jul 2014 01:30:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1515547No longer must developers sign in to one or more online portals and hit a bunch of buttons to load up or adjust the public-cloud infrastructure they use. With Terraform, that work can happen right from a developer's command line.
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Mitchell Hashimoto, the guy who created the popular Vagrant tool for setting up development environments, has gone and built another useful tool for developers working on public-cloud platforms.

No longer must developers sign in to one or more online portals and hit a bunch of buttons to load up or adjust the public-cloud infrastructure they use. With Terraform, that work can happen right from a developer’s command line.

“With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers,” Hashimoto’s company, HashiCorp, wrote in a blog post today announcing the new tool.

From the beginning, then, Terraform could be useful for developers at companies who want to create or manage IT architectures across multiple clouds.

And that right there is what separates it from some tools that already exist for manipulating cloud infrastructure. The Amazon cloud’s CloudFormation tool, for instance, can only handle Amazon infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Terraform can work in lock step with existing configuration-management tools like Puppet and Chef. It’s not a competitor of those widely used services.

Mostly cast in the increasingly popular Go programming language, Terraform can come in handy for several purposes. For instance, launching the infrastructure for a demonstration of software becomes faster. From the Terraform site:

Software writers can provide a Terraform configuration to create, provision and bootstrap a demo on cloud providers like AWS. This allows end users to easily demo the software on their own infrastructure, and even enables tweaking parameters like cluster size to more rigorously test tools at any scale.

Keep an eye on Terraform. If Vagrant’s success is any indicator, it could end up becoming a common element of many developers’ tool sets.

]]>0Meet Terraform, a simple command-line tool to manage all your cloud infrastructureScientist invents a cloak of visibility … against ocean waves (!)http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/scientist-invents-a-cloak-of-visibility-against-ocean-waves/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/scientist-invents-a-cloak-of-visibility-against-ocean-waves/#commentsMon, 19 Nov 2012 17:53:49 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=576714Just weeks ago Hurricane Sandy pounded the east coast of the United States with horrific consequences. But imagine a machine that could make massive ocean waves simply disappear.
]]>Just weeks ago Hurricane Sandy pounded the east coast of the United States with horrific consequences. But imagine a machine that could make massive ocean waves simply disappear.

Or, more precisely, a way of geoforming the ocean floor to almost eliminate surface waves.

Sessions at the 65th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s division of fluid dynamics include presumably fascinating talks on “Bubbles,” “Vortex,” “General Fluids,” and “Drops.” Not to mention “Bubbles II.”

One paper being presented, however, has a less pedestrian title: “A Cloak of Invisibility Against Ocean Waves.” Reza Alam, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will be speaking about a way he has discovered of neutralizing ocean waves in near-shore or off-shore areas.

How?

The magic — or the science — lies in the fact that, as Alam explained to Phys.org, the ocean is stratified into layers: warmer, less dense water at the top, and colder, heavier water at the bottom. Each layer has waves: surface waves at the top, and internal waves in the lower levels. And, crucially, all waves — even surface waves — interact with the ocean floor.

By “properly architecting the bottom corrugations” of the ocean floor, Alam has discovered that “floating objects in stratified fluids can be cloaked against broadband incident waves.” Translation: by making the right hills and valleys in the ocean floor, waves can be transformed from surface waves to internal waves.

Meaning that, from the perspective of an observer floating on the surface of the ocean, the waves have simply disappeared. Of course, they actually have not — they have simply become internal waves deeper within the ocean layers.

And a reverse effect is possible as well. As Alam told Phys.org, “In reverse, it can cause the … reappearance of surface waves in areas where sandbars or any other appreciable bottom variations exist.”

Which means that the same technology that might help shelter marinas or offshore installations might also be used to create a surfer’s paradise.